1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to human-machine dialogs and more specifically to a contextual question answering system in which a user's information needs are satisfied through an interactive question and answer dialog.
2. Introduction
Question Answering (QA) is an interactive human-machine process that aims to respond to users' natural language questions with exact answers rather than a list of documents. In the last few years, QA has attracted broader research attention from both the information retrieval (Voorhees, 2004) and the computational linguistic fields. See for example, conferences held at Macquarie University in Australia are at the University's Center for Language Technology. Publicly accessible web-based QA systems, such as AskJeeves and Start, have scaled up this technology to open-domain solutions. More task-oriented QA systems are deployed as virtual customer care agents addressing questions about specific domains. For instance, the AT&T Ask Allie® is able to answer questions about the AT&T plans and services; and the Ikea “Just Ask Anna!” agent targets questions pertaining the company's catalog.
Most of these QA systems, however, are limited to answer questions in isolation. There are challenges and deficiencies in this approach in that there may be other information available for providing an appropriate answer or response that is not being utilized. To address the deficiencies currently requires much human intervention which costs money and time when a company is seeking to implement an automated question and answer system.